Puritan Economic Experiments

About the Title

When the Puritans got off the Arabella and waded ashore to Massachusetts in 1630, they carried a heavy burden with them: five hundred years of accumulated unsound economic doctrines. This system of thought is today called scholastic economics. Actually, the later Spanish scholastic economists who were contemporaries of the Puritans had adopted free market views, but the Puritans had never heard of them. So, a series of disastrous economic experiments began in New England.

The Pilgrims had been compelled by prior contract to set up a basically socialist system in 1620 - the common storehouse - and had come very close to starving as a result. They dropped this practice within two years, long before the arrival of their neighbors, the Puritans. The Puritans did not make the same mistake. But they made others: extensive publicly owned lands for grazing, controls on who was allowed to buy and sell land, price and wage controls, quality controls, public guilds and monopolies, and controls on people's fashions. They learned first-hand what government controls produce: conflict and shortages.

For almost half a century, the Puritans ran the experiment. They served as willing guineas pigs. Eventually, they learned. Anyway, their children learned. In 1675, the great Indian war broke out - King Philip's War. The politicians tightened controls on the economy, and it began to break down. By the time the war was over a year later, the Puritans had learned their lesson. They abolished economic controls for good, and the economy boomed.

This is a story of nearly half a century of Puritan experiments with government controls, all in the name of Christian ethics, and why those experiments were finally abandoned as a failure. The Puritans learned from experience. Not until the American Revolution broke out a century later did American colonists again attempt to impose a comparable system of economic controls, and the result of those controls was the near-starvation of Washington's army at Valley Forge in 1777. Similar experiment - similar result.

Author: Dr. Gary North

Specifications: Paperback, 70 pages

© 1988